Just because your preschooler is interested in pirates doesn’t mean you should be plugging in The Pirates of the Caribbean! (Unless they are fearless enough to really be a pirate.) Here are some terrific pirate movies and books for the younger set…
5 MOVIES
1. Peter Pan (1953) – 4+ (on amazon)
2. Muppet Treasure Island (1996) – 4+ (on amazon)
3. Return to Never Land (2002) – 4+ (on amazon)
4. Treasure Island (1950) – 5+ (on amazon)
5. Captain Blood (1935) – 6+ (on amazon)
5 BOOKS
1. Captain Pugwash, by John Ryan – 3+ (on amazon)
2. Come Away From the Water, Shirley, by John Burningham – 3+ (on amazon)
3. The Pirate and the Penguin, by Patricia Storms – 3+ (on amazon)
4. How I Became a Pirate, by Melinda Long – 4+ (on amazon)
5. Pirate Girl, by Cornelia Funke – 5+ (on amazon)
More on pirates to come. I’m collecting titles for a comprehensive Pirate Overview…
Rarest Kind of Best 
Fairy Tale Controversy, Part 1
03 Jun 2011 Leave a comment
by Kim in Books, Classics, Commentary Tags: Fairy Tale
“Why should the mind be filled with fantastic visions, instead of useful knowledge? Why should so much valuable time be lost? Why should we vitiate their taste, and spoil their appetite, by suffering them to feed upon sweetmeats?” – Maria Edgeworth, Preface to The Parent’s Assistant (1796) ¹
Fairy tales go back a long way. Early versions of “Beauty and the Beast” were told in classical Greece and ancient India.² A written version of “Sleeping Beauty” exists from the 20th Dynasty in Egypt.³ It’s truly astonishing how similar folk and fairy tales are across all cultures, sharing plotlines, characters, themes and motifs. The most well-known stories today are only a tiny fraction of thousands of stories from all parts of the globe, and come to us largely from two publications: Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé by Charles Perrault (1696) and the German collections of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1812-1857).
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